Key Details

The Brief

With the release of ‘All You Need is Now’, their 13th studio album, the band are giving film makers around the world the chance to make music videos for the entire album. There is a $5,000 prize for each of the nine tracks, making a total prize pool of $45,000. Once the entries are in, five finalists will be selected for each song by Duran Duran and Genero.tv. The band will then choose the winner for each track, and a compilation of the successful entrants will be released on DVD around the launch of the physical CD in late February.

Duran Duran

When they first broke in the early 1980s Duran Duran single-handedly transformed music video from a gimmicky marketing tool into one of the music industry’s most valued assets. With exotic locations, beautiful girls and stunning special-effects, Duran Duran took the visual imperatives of the New Romantic movement to another level. From the controversial video for Girls on Film, which was so risqué it was banned, to one of the most expensive music clips ever made, for Wild Boys, the band have always been at the forefront of the music video revolution.

Duran Duran, a band with more era-defining songs to their name than most, have, on their extraordinary new album, reconnected with the sounds, the textures, the melodies and the lyrical evocation that first propelled them to the top of the charts the world over. The result, produced by Mark Ronson, already sounds like a classic.

Selling over 80 million records over their three-decade career, Duran Duran certainly has a storied history, but this new tale begins in 2008. As part of a year-long run, they headlined festivals in a number of countries, playing arenas in others, and became the first group to perform at the Louvre Museum in Paris. Two nights later, in the same city, Duran Duran treated fans to a specially created “mega-mix” one-hour set that was filmed in a tiny theatre, with long-time-fan, Mark Ronson. This rare live performance, immediately proved that there was a powerful chemistry between Ronson and the band, and within just a few weeks, a much larger collaboration had developed, with Mark committing to produce the band’s 13th studio album. Starting out in the late Spring of 2009, at Sphere Studios in London, this much-anticipated Duran/Ronson union flourished, as writing and recording began on an exciting new body of work, which Ronson has boldly stated is the “imaginary follow up to Rio that never was.”

With this newfound partnership, the band was energized and excited by the music they were creating. The result is nothing short of pure Duran Duran brilliance. The album features guest vocals/rap from longtime Duran Duran pal/collaborator Ana Matronic of the Scissor Sisters and R&B/neo-soul superstar Kelis, while Owen Pallett of Arcade Fire contributes the album’s string arrangements.

Now a seemingly unstoppable force, with no fewer than five prestigious Lifetime Achievement Awards under their belt in the last few years from MTV, the Brit Awards, the Ivor Novellos, the Spanish Ondas and Q Magazine, the four original members of Duran Duran are in a category with only a handful of other internationally acclaimed artists. As this new chapter begins, they have nothing left to prove, but everything to play for. So for them…All You Need Is Now!

"John: The title came from one of Nick’s and my silly games, the idea being, “What would we call our offshoot electro ensemble?” The answer was “Blame The Machines”, which Mark loved. The lyric idea followed on from that, basing it on a story in the Herald Tribune about a German driver who was killed when his GPS sent him the wrong way up a freeway off-ramp. Blame the machines indeed."